“Arrangements for a duel were in preparation…”

Earlier this month I had an online discussion with Kevin M. Levin, creator of Civil War Memory (now on Substack) and author of an upcoming book on Col. Robert Gould Shaw.

It concerned a passage from the third Josiah Quincy’s biography of Samuel Shaw (1754–1794, shown here)—Continental officer, early American diplomat, and brother of Col. Shaw’s great-grandfather.

I discussed that passage years ago in a comment but never in a posting until now. It describes young Shaw’s experience in 1774–75, when he was twenty years old:

The northern part of Boston, where he resided, was also the abode of some of the most active and ardent spirits who gave character and impulse to the first movements of the American Revolution.

Troops, sent from the parent state to awe the colonies into submission, and parading the streets of Boston, were continual causes of excitement and anger; giving intensity to feelings which it was difficult to restrain, and impossible to allay. Boston being at that time regarded by the British as a garrison town, the officers of the army were billeted on the inhabitants. The house of Francis Shaw was assigned for quarters to Major Pitcairn and Lieutenant Wragg.

A tradition in the family states, that, the latter having at the table, in the presence of Samuel Shaw, spoken of the Americans as “cowards and rebels,” he immediately resented the reproach, and transmitted to the lieutenant a challenge. While arrangements for a duel were in preparation, the fact came to the knowledge of Major Pitcairn, who interfered, and, either by influence or authority, obtained from the lieutenant such an apology for the offence as Mr. Shaw was willing to accept, and the affair was thus terminated.

On the 2d of October, 1775, Samuel Shaw attained the age of manhood, and, with the assent of his father, immediately took measures to insure his enrolment in the army, then collecting at Cambridge under the auspices of Washington.

The immediate question was: Who was this “Lt. Wragg”? I looked in published Army Lists from the 1770s and found no officer with that last name. But there was a Lt. John Ragg in the marines. So that must have been the man sharing quarters with Maj. John Pitcairn.

Pitcairn arrived in Boston in November 1774, part of Gen. Thomas Gage’s build-up of the royal military after the rest of the province slipped out of his control in September. Ragg presumably arrived at the same time, though it’s conceivable he came with another set of marines in March 1775.

Although this anecdote appears in Quincy’s book after mentions of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, it definitely didn’t happen that late. Pitcairn died from his wounds right after the second battle. The story feels like something that would have happened before the shooting war actually began, during the tense winter of 1774–75.

TOMORROW: Reading between the lines.